David Farnor | On 12, Jun 2015

YouTube now supports 8K videos – not that your computer can play them yet.

The ad-supported VOD service has been upping its tech game of late, in an attempt to fend off rivals such as Twitch and Vimeo. 3D support was introduced a long time ago and now 360-degree videos and 60fps live streams are also possible.

This week, though, the first video has been uploaded to the site in 8K – a resolution so advanced that nobody can actually watch it.

Ghost Towns, filmed by Luke and Marika Neumann, follows a person walking through an abandoned settlement. The movie was shot on a RED Epic Dragon 6K camera. To get the full 8K resolution, the directors filmed everything in portrait and stitched the resulting footage together

“Some shots [were] simply scaled up by 125% from 6.1K to meet the 7.6K standard,” adds the video description.

Think your computer can handle the processing power required to display the 8K stream in Chrome or Safari? Have a go below – although even then, monitors cannot technically render anything in a higher resolution than 4K, presuming you can afford a UHD screen in the first place.

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